Between the Islands - and the Continent

This volume constitutes a collection of papers presented at a conference held at the University of Bonn entitled Between the Islands – and the Continent, 7th-9th October 2010, organised by the Department for German and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Scandinavian Section (Asya Ivanova and Rudolf Simek). Two further papers (by Rekdal and Simek) were given at an earlier conference in March 2009 at the University of Cambridge entitled Between the Islands: Interaction with Vikings in Ireland and Britain in the Early Medieval Period, organised by Fiona Edmonds and Máire Ní Mhaonaigh of the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. That Cambridge conference was the inspiration for the Bonn event; the former focused on the trilateral relations between Ireland, the British Isles and Scandinavia as an area of interchange of cultural ideas emanating from Ireland in the Early Middle Ages. The follow-up conference in Bonn represented in this volume focussed less on the rôle of Britain as a hub for the Hiberno-Scandinavian interchange, but concentrated more on the relations between Ireland, the Western European mainland and Scandinavia as an area of intensive cultural contacts, not least through the Hiberno-Scottish missionary movement. Thus, several papers were concerned with hagiography or the development of religious writings as such. Most of the papers at this meeting concentrated on relationships between these areas in the realms of literature and learning, although the social and political implications of the interaction of elites came into view from several angles as well.